COMMENTATORS AND TRANSLATIONS

The ancient Greek reinterpretations of the Greek philosophy of Aristotle (384–322 BCE) form a missing link in the history of Western Philosophy. They spanned 700 years to the 6th century CE, with a renewal starting in the 12th century and form the largest body of surviving ancient Greek literature.

Since 1987, 107 volumes of English translation will have been published by January 2019 in the series Ancient Commentators on Aristotle founded by Richard Sorabji, and a further 12 volumes are currently in preparation. Aristotle’s words and ideas receive intense scrutiny, but accomplished new philosophers reinterpret them in response to subsequent rival schools of pagan philosophy and eventually to the need of an increasingly Christian empire to absorb and come to terms with pagan ideas.

​In a 6th century explosion, the Greek commentaries on Aristotle reached Syriac and middle Persian in the court of Khushrau I, the pre-Islamic king of Persia, and from there in the 8th to 12th centuries CE influenced a vibrant Muslim philosophy in Arabic-speaking countries. Without Latin translations from both Arabic and surviving Greek starting at the end of the 12th century, the Latin-speaking philosophy and science of the Western middle ages could not have enjoyed comparable success.​Visit the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle website​here

Ancient commentators: a celebration of 100 volumes at Wolfson College

​﻿Book reviews

'A truly breath-taking achievement, with few parallels in the history of scholarly endeavour'. David Sedley, Times Literary Supplement March 2013

'A scholarly marvel. A massive scholarly endeavour of the highest importance. For such an undertaking to be commissioned in this day and age is the stuff of which legends are made'. Peter Jones in The Times of London

'Without any doubt the most important event of recent decades in the study of Arabic philosophy'.A. Hasnaoui, CNRS Paris

'The execution of this project is one of the great scholarly achievements of our time. In making the work of the commentators, hitherto the province of scholarly specialists, available to a wider philosophical public it has already led to a revaluation of their philosophical significance; the horizons have already expanded and will continue to do so'. Christopher Taylor, Review in British Journal for the History of Philosophy of Festschrift, ed., Ricardo Salles, Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics: Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji

'The Greek commentators are now being read around the world with an intensity of interest they have not received since they were first written'. Myles Burnyeat, Classical Association News

'The situation has changed radically during the last three decades, mostly thanks to Sorabji's projects. The huge corpus of the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca is now intensively studied and the philosophy of the commentators is widely recognized as a crucial aspect of ancient thought. The Sourcebook can be seen as the crowning of this renaissance of interest'.Riccardo Chiradonna and Marwan Rasheed, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 38, 2010, reviewing the 3-volume Sourcebook on the subject

A renewed interest in this corpus [the commentators] has represented one of the biggest shifts in the study of ancient philosophy over the past 30 years. Largely this has been instigated by the Ancient Commentators Project led by Richard Sorabji'.Peter Adamson, 'The last philosophers of late antiquity in the Arabic tradition', in Entretiens Fondation Hardt vol. 57, 2010, p. 2

‘The most important enterprise of translation in this sphere … is the one organised by Richard Sorabji and his collection “Ancient Commentators on Aristotle”. Thanks to his conception and his interest, this project, whose implementation began in the last two decades of the 20th century, is comparable to the realisation of the “Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca” (CAG) by the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin (a series begun about a century before that of R. Sorabji …). These two enterprises clearly far surpass the scale of the commentaries of Simplicius and R. Sorabji’s project exceeds even the scale of the CAG corpus, since it includes the translation of the commentary of Simplicius on the Handbook of Epictetus, so that the entire work of Simplicius is in course of being translated. Without any doubt, it is this enterprise of R. Sorabji which has had the greatest impact among historians of ancient philosophy. … This rich collection of translations … will in fact allow an initial panorama and an initial orientation in relatively little time. It will also be of great utility for historians of philosophy in Arabic, Syriac, etc., who seek to grasp and define the influence of Greek philosophy on the Middle East. … For having been able to organise and finance an enterprise of these dimensions in present circumstances, R. Sorabji will deserve the profound respect and gratitude of all his colleagues.’Ilsetraut Hadot, Le Néoplatonicien Simplicius à la lumière des recherches contemporaines, Academia, Verlag, Sankt Augustin, 2014, pp. 285-6.

Richard Sorabji, ed.,Aristotle Reinterpreted: New Findings on Seven Hundred Years of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle, with 80-page introduction, Bloomsbury, London 2016.

Short introductions to 31 volumes of translation with seven longer essays in others:

1. ‘Boethius, Ammonius and their different Greek backgrounds’, in Ammonius, Boethius on On Interpretation 9, 1998.2. ﻿'The three deterministic arguments opposed by Ammonius’﻿, in Ammonius, Boethius on On Interpretation 9, 1998.3. On the commentaries on Aristotle’s Categories, in Simplicius on Aristotle Categories 9-15, 2002. 4. On Aristotle’s principles, Introduction to ﻿Simplicius On Aristotle’s Physics 1.5-9, 2011﻿.5. An introduction to the commentators in the first volume, 1987, has been reprinted as an appendix to many of the other volumes. (Excerpts reprinted in William E Mann, Augustine’s Confessions: Critical Essays).6. ﻿‘Waiting for Philoponus’﻿, Introduction to Philoponus’ Gazan predecessors: Aeneas Theophrastus, Zacharias, Ammonius, 20127. ﻿‘Date of Philoponus’ ﻿commentary, relation to Ammonius and revised history of universals from Aristotle to Philoponus’, Introduction to Philoponus on Aristotle’s Categories 1-5, 2014

A new focus has been on the transmission of the Greek commentators' tradition to other cultures, reflected in Aristotle Re-Interpreted 2016, in the 2016 translation of the expositions of the exiled Athenian philosophers to King Khosroes of Persia in 631 AD, and in the increasing translation of lost Greek commentaries from Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac or Latin versions, or retro-translation from the conjectured Greek when the foreign version has distorted it too badly. ​